Garageband on the iPad

The assignment was simple and something that I had done for the past eight years.  The students (in groups) choose what they believe to be the top five amendments.  They must also explain why their amendments are in the top five and what the nation would be like without those amendments. 

In years past they've made posters, powerpoints, prezis, and things of that nature.  Last year (my first 1:1 year) I decided to take a different route and let the kids make podcasts.  The website I chose was podomatic.com.  I had one master account the students uploaded to but could only work one at a time when recording and uploading. 

This year my department lobbied to purchase a few iPads/iPods and I made the decision to utilize them on this assignment.  Garageband is a $4.99 app and well worth it for use in the classroom.  With the iPads and Garageband students were able to completely record, edit, produce, and upload their podcasts to iTunes which they could then pull into my iWeb website.   Multiple students were able to work at the same time and uploading took seconds.  Also, students were able to make their own original music to go with their podcasts using the smart instruments. 

Pros

• Very user-friendly for the students and the learning curve is very short.
• No disk space to worry about.
• No need to worry about copyrighted music (students make their own content).
• Easily manageable by the classroom teacher.  
• Excellent for schools/teachers that have embraced BYOD.

Cons

• You still need a main computer to pull it into your website.  
• As far as I know you cannot upload a podcast image to Garageband.

Overall I was very happy with how this assignment turned out and plan on having the students podcast weekly wrap-ups starting next semester.  If you would like to listen for yourself how things went for my students click here to view our class podcast page.  Enjoy!